Still

I found a quiet spot the other day.
Not the quiet of solitude, or stillness or the quiet of nature.
Quiet like ideas,
where everything is written on paper,
with silent pencils
and never read
and never thrown in a crumpled ball
into the trashcan of your psyche.

So quiet, you can hear
the blood pump behind your ear drum,
as if your body abhors silence
so much it has to shout
“I am still here.”

I have been told the only way
we know we’re truly alive
is because of input,
that we are computers,
crunching numbers with fury,
and the second it all stops,
when the great fan of life is still,
we don’t know if there was every anything
running through our power socket.

So maybe, in this quiet place,
it all stops
and we become ideas of people,
something silent and not quite real,
the same way we spend our days
singing songs like whales or birds,
just in case,
we disappear for a moment
when it all gets too still.